Talk of the Town — May 2026

Talk of the Town is our series where we highlight neat public vals from the Val Town community. We have something for everyone, from OpenAI voice models & Claude managed agents to counting sheep on a cron val. And if you’re more watcher than reader, please enjoy a video walkthrough. --- Justin Uberti, Head of Realtime AI at OpenAI and creator of WebRTC, is back with another OpenAI demo on Val Town: realtime-typer, live at realtyper.val.run, which transcribes speech to text using with impressively low latency. Justin also updated his hello-realtime demo to use the new model (which now has “reasoning” capabilities). It’s live at hello-realtime.val.run, or by calling 425-800-0042! --- Charlie built a claude-managed-agents val to showcase Anthropic’s new managed agents, launched last week. As Michael on the Anthropic team said, you can remix the val to get managed agents working in under 2 minutes. Charlie also improved our ai-slackbot template val, which pre-fills API scopes, events, and webhook URL from a manifest file to make the Time To Aha even faster setting up your Slack agent. --- Tijs Teulings customized a pocket e-reader with a Val Town backend to pull a reading list and convert to EPUB. Tijs also made an openpds val, live at openpds.val.run, and an atproto-to-fediverse val that syncs Bluesky posts to Mastodon, live on atproto-to-fediverse.val.run. And bonus points: Tijs’s personal website is also a val! --- Eric Feng from Kernel made playwright-cdp-connect to connect to a Kernel browser via CDP using Playwright. The Kernel team also has vals for Stagehand + Gemini Computer Use, Playwright, and Puppeteer. --- Paul Kinlan, Chrome DevRel Lead at Google, is back at it again with a Hacker News watcher val, live at hn-push.val.run. --- Omar Aziz from Tempo (Stripe’s blockchain) made an mpp-demo val to showcase the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). --- Kaspars Dancis, founder and CTO of Whimsical, made a useful cron val that checks availability of a domain name. We remixed his val into a domain-availability template that lets you add as many domains as you’d like to track and emails you when they become available. I know I’d like my surname’s dot com, but I don’t think the circa-1858 family furniture company who owns it (no relation) will give it up any time soon. --- Mariano Guerra, co-author of WASM from the Ground Up and the Feeling of Computing newsletter, made a recursive-task-lists REST API using Val Town SQLite and OAuth. --- Sri made a vsky-network val, live at vsky.val.run, that broadcasts crawl requests to a network of atproto relays. --- Alex McRoberts made a bluesky-thread-reader val, live at btr.val.run. --- Steve gave a talk at the Betaworks Beyond Text event, and of course made a beyond-text val to demo live. Steve also built voice-townie, a way to talk to Townie via phone using the Vapi voice agent and Val Town MCP server, and remix-3-beta-demo, a minimal val using recently released Remix 3. Steve also recorded a Val Town 101 video for anyone who wants to learn how to (vibe) code: “This is the video I wish I could’ve watched when I was 14 and wanted to know how to make web apps.” Pass it along to those friends of yours who want to build websites and finally feel like they might be able to. --- Jenn Schiffer made a counting-sheep-on-bluesky val to power her counting sheep bot: 30k sheep and counting 🐑 --- kamalnrf as a prolific Val Town power user relies on his valLauncher to conveniently search through the public HTTP endpoints across all of his vals. He also made defuddle, live at defuddle.val.run as a convenient wrapper around the defuddle web page to markdown service. I think anyone will have fun (and maybe eat some humble pie) spending 5 or 10 minutes on Kamal’s flag-quiz.val.run 🇯🇵 🇧🇯 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇦🇶 🇨🇦 🇪🇨 🇦🇺 --- Nico Baier, another prolific citizen of Val Town, created: brrr and ntfy, push notification libraries for brrr.now and ntfy.sh, respectively; sheet-exporter to export public Google Sheets to CSV or JSON; vt-ssg, a lightweight static site generator; and agentfs, a Val Town port of Pekka Enberg’s agentfs. --- Peter Liu made SQLiteTable, his own SQLite ORM of sorts with HTTP access and vector search. --- Raymond Camden wrote another fun Val Town blog post! Using Val Town and Gemini for Sports Ball Stuff. --- Britt Lewis made pruning-calculator, a prompt cache economics pruning calculator. --- Josh Beckman from Shopify made a preRead val to consumer a web page through the lens of his knowledge garden. --- Ajaya from Subconcious made subconscious-getting-started to use the Subconscious AI agent API on Val Town. --- William Kang ported he and Luke Muoio’s WHOOP dataset/study to Val Town. --- v7er made epocket, a backend for a Chrome extension that defines and saves words as you browse the web. --- garmeeh made MyEnergi to automate Zappi and Eddi charging devices using the MyEnergi API. --- andrewau made lyric.val.run, a lyric analysis API tool for Claude. --- bao created natgeo, an RSS feed for National Geographic articles. --- Ish made a does-one-thing val called HowManyDays live at howmanydays.val.run. We’re already 131 days into 2026! --- recoeye made an api-watchdog val that monitors your API every minute and reports downtime to Slack with live-updating messages. --- Douglas Mustapick made a personal website val for his AI consulting business. --- ewired made hf-activity-rss, an RSS feed for HuggingFace user activity pages. --- If you’d like to be featured in next month’s Talk, share your vals in our channel on Discord! (Or share them around the web, and we’ll see them in Discord thanks to Octolens.)